She won't change horses in midcareer

DAVID BONETTI, EXAMINER ART CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Friday, November 14, 1997

IT IS INTERESTING to watch how modern artists deal with the idea of consistency and change. While artists before the mid-19th century revolution in aesthetics tended to hold firm to a set of beliefs throughout an entire career, changing only slightly over the years, modern artists often drop an idea as soon as it is played out.

The problem is to remain true to one's self through the changes. Picasso, for instance, tried out in every movement that came along during his long life, but he was always Picasso.

Modern artists who pursue repeatedly the same set of ideas or images frequently fall into a rut and end up producing formula work - think of Chagall or Dali. The example of Giorgio Morandi, whose vision remained fresh even as he began his 100th variation on the still life, is rare in 20th century art.

A good example of a contemporary artist whose work remains fresh through endless repetition is Deborah Butterfield, who has been elaborating on the theme of the horse for more than 20 years. In a show of new work at Gallery Paule Anglim, 14 Geary St., through Dec. 20, the Montana-based artist is showing seven of her familiar horses. None is hurt by the fact that it has been preceded by what has turned out to be a large and very impressive herd.

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During her early years, Butterfield's horses were frequently made from sticks daubed with dried mud that occupied the white-cube interiors of galleries like visitors out of a primeval past. In more recent years, however, she has made them out of bronze and welded steel - more long-lasting materials that, while less likely to shred, crack or splinter, exhibit no less power.

Anglim's current, fourth show by the artist features five small works that tend toward a height of 3 feet and a length of 4 or 5 feet that all effectively capture the equine essence. But the two big 8-by-10 feet horses that command the gallery's large room will stop you in your tracks.

"Untitled (Large White Steel)" is made of recycled welded steel that bears large patches of white paint and generous traces of rust. "Arched Neck" is a bronze cast from branches of trees.

Together, they create an engaging discourse on the subject of nature and culture. Both are works of art, the products of culture, based on images of nature, the horse.

One sculpture is made from wood branches that Butterfield has bent and shaped eloquently into animal form and made permanent by the industrial process of bronze casting. The other, made exclusively from industrial-age detritus, is no less effective in its evocation of nature. This horse, with its gracefully arching neck, represents nature at its most beautiful and noble.

The Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 250 Sutter St., has joined that exclusive fraternity of galleries that have survived 10 years. To celebrate, it has mounted through Nov. 29 a group show of artists it has shown over the past decade. Known until last year as the Contemporary Realist Gallery, Hackett-Freedman shows exclusively representational, if not strictly realist, art. Although there are a few portraits or figurative works on view, the majority of paintings are still lifes and landscapes.

Many of the paintings in the show do not appeal to my personal taste, but even within a genre with which I am not terribly sympathetic there are some outstanding works.

The new panel painting by San Franciscan Robert Schwartz, for instance, is, as we have come to expect of him, a little gem. The untitled miniature is an apocalyptic vision. A handsome man in green pants and a white shirt - waters flowing uncontrollably around him in the ruins of stuccoed buildings - grimaces as the world around him collapses into chaos.

Schwartz has found a soul mate in Rhode Island-based allegorical painter Andrew Raftery, whose meticulously painted five-paneled painting is based on the form of medieval-era portable altarpieces. "Cosmetic Counter" shows a young couple at a department store cosmetics counter, where the male clerk and the man of the couple seem to be finding a mutual interest in something other than lip gloss.

Among the still lifes, one painting by Raymond Han, who brings an Asian sensibility to a Western subject, and two by Martha Mayer Erlebacher, who is thoroughly steeped in Renaissance style, are outstanding. Among the landscapes, a painting of Marin by Willard Dixon and one of backyard Richmond District gardens by Peter Nye are sure to please.

Who ever convinced the American middle-class that it was living the good life? All its pursuit of convenience and pleasure - perhaps incompatible goals - seems to end in naught. At least that is the grim message Robert Adams delivered in "What We Bought: The New World, Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, 1970-74," being shown at the Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary St., through Nov. 22. This is the first time these bleak images - 183 of them - have been shown in the United States.

Adams, a MacArthur Fellowship winner, documented the environmental depredation and destruction that occurred as Denver, like other Western cities, exploded in population. He captures scenes of heartbreaking ugliness as ticky-tacky housing projects, relieved only by cheaply built and quickly thrown up fast-food drive-ins and 24-hour food stores, spread across the landscape.

Littered lots, treeless subdivisions, apartment blocks decorated with shingled mansard roofs, all photographed under unforgiving winter skies, contribute to the evidence that, despite their personal automobiles and sectional sofas, most Americans live a daily life of artless deprivation. No wonder their kids turn to drugs and Jesus.

Isn't "parking lot" the ugliest phrase in the American language?

The Shapiro Gallery, 250 Sutter St., has mounted through Nov. 29 a 35-print retrospective of San Francisco-based photographer Alma Lavenson (1897-1989) on the 100th anniversary of her birth.

A member of the f / 64 group of photographers that espoused a purist vision, Lavenson took pictures that look familiar even if you've never seen them before. Abstracted calla leaves, industry, close-ups of hands, Ansel Adams-like images of a pristine Yosemite, the nostalgia of old California towns and the solid geometry of Southwest Indian settlements are some of her subjects.&lt;

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